Poll: Obama Takes Lead In IowaBy Greg Sargent - November 19, 2007, 5:13PMThe new Washington Post/ABC News poll that Dems have been talking about today has finally been released -- and it finds that Obama has edged into a lead over Hillary in Iowa, though the race remains close.

Obama has 30% of likely voters, while Hillary has 26% and Edwards has 22%.

The poll shows that Obama has marginally increased his standing since WaPo's last Iowa poll in August, which found Obama at 27%, with Hillary and Edwards at 26%.

But various findings in today's poll suggest that rival criticism of Hillary might be working. Obama is ahead of her by 2-1 as the most honest and trustworthy candidate. And 55% say that "new ideas" is more important to them in a candidate, while 33% pick "strength and experience." Obama has argued that he's the race's true change agent, while Hillary counters that only she has the strength and experience to realize real change.

Key fact: Obama is running even with Hillary among Iowa women, 32%-31%.

Hillary Clinton has moved into attack mode against her main rival Barack Obama after a poll put him ahead in Iowa, where the first caucus to decide the Democratic Party's presidential nominee is held in less than a month.

Full coverage: US election 2008Speaking on the campaign trail in the Midwestern state, the former First Lady said "Now the fun part starts," before launching into a character assassination of Mr Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been resorting to personal attacks

"How did running for president become a qualification to be president?" she demanded. "This is not a job you can learn about from a book."

Mrs Clinton sneered at Mr Obama for dodging difficult votes on abortion and gun control when he was a state senator and mocked him for a lack of experience and over-reaching ambition.

"So you decide which makes more sense: entrust our country to someone who is ready on day one … or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the US Senate," she told an audience in Clear Lake, Iowa.

The 46-year-old senator has previously suggested that Mrs Clinton feels she has a right to the presidency after eight years as First Lady and six as senator for New York, and claimed he only decided to run for the White House relatively recently.

The row between the two rivals reached its low point when the Clinton campaign issued a press release quoting an essay written by Mr Obama at the age of six at nursery school in Indonesia, entitled "I want to become president".

Phil Singer, a Clinton spokesman, said the essay proved his words were hollow. "Senator Obama's relatives and friends say he has been talking about running for president for at least the last 15 years. So who's not telling the truth, them or him?" he said.

With the battle for the 2008 nomination sliding towards open warfare, Mr Obama's campaign set up a website on Monday, Hillary Attacks, chronicling "baseless attacks" on his record and character and appealing for donations to strengthen the campaign. Mrs Clinton's advisers maintain that they are merely responding to weeks of personal criticism by Mr Obama and John Edwards, the third-placed contender, who have portrayed her as a dissembler and a centrist who not only voted for the Iraq war but refuses to apologise for doing so.

The former First Lady still tops national polls, but has seen a seven-point lead in Iowa eroded over the past two months.

Much of her appeal to voters has been the aura of "inevitability" around her well-disciplined campaign, which has been engendered by her experience, command of the issues and eloquence.

But many pundits think her lack of personal rapport with voters means her support is much wider than it is deep.

If that starts to slip, then an Obama win in Iowa could give him the momentum for victory in New Hampshire and other states that vote soon afterwards.

advertisementAlthough Mr Obama's three-point lead in Iowa is below the margin of error, he is seen as the candidate with the momentum behind him, prompting Mrs Clinton to change course.

• George W Bush has said that he misses being on the campaign trail for the presidency apart from the respiratory infection he said he caught from a reporter covering his 2000 campaign.

Some W.H. hopefuls skip reading key Iraq reportWASHINGTON (CNN) -- A new biography's suggestion that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't personally read a key intelligence report before her 2002 vote to authorize war in Iraq has raised eyebrows, but Clinton was not alone.

Clinton did not read the 90-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which summarized the reports of U.S. intelligence agencies, but was briefed on it several times, a spokesman told CNN.

The book, "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton," is by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. It is one of two upcoming biographies of Clinton, the former first lady turned New York senator.

She is one of four current and former Democratic senators now seeking the presidential nomination who voted for the October 2002 resolution that authorized President Bush to use force in Iraq, clearing the way for the invasion the following March. Two Republican senators who are now presidential hopefuls, John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas, also voted in favor of the resolution.

Like Clinton, a spokesman for McCain told CNN his boss was briefed on the document "numerous times, and read the executive summary." A spokesman for Sen. Christopher Dodd said the Connecticut Democrat did not read the document, either.

Efforts to contact other lawmakers for comment were unsuccessful Monday.

By PATRICK HEALYPublished: December 26, 2007As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jaw-boned the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Roman Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward.

But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.

And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled.

In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.”

Her rivals scoff at the idea that her background gives her any special qualifications for the presidency. Senator Barack Obama has especially questioned “what experiences she’s claiming” as first lady, noting that the job is not the same as being a cabinet member, much less president.

And late last week, Mr. Obama suggested that more foreign policy experts from the Clinton administration were supporting his candidacy than hers; his campaign released a list naming about 45 of them, and said that others were not ready to go public. Mrs. Clinton quickly put out a list of 80 who were supporting her, and plans to release another 75 names on Wednesday.

Mrs. Clinton’s role in her most high-profile assignment as first lady, the failed health care initiative of the early 1990s, has been well documented. Yet little has been made public about her involvement in foreign policy and national security as first lady. Documents about her work remain classified at the National Archives. Mrs. Clinton has declined to divulge the private advice she gave her husband.

An interview with Mrs. Clinton, conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and a review of books about her White House years suggest that she was more of a sounding board than a policy maker, who learned through osmosis rather than decision-making, and who grew gradually more comfortable with the use of military power.

Her time in the White House was a period of transition in foreign policy and national security, with the cold war over and the threat of Islamic terrorism still emerging. As a result, while in the White House, she was never fully a part of either the old school that had been focused on the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war or the more recent strain of national security thinking defined by issues like nonstate threats and the proliferation of nuclear technology.

Associates from that time said that she was aware of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and what her husband has in recent years characterized as his intense focus on them, but that she made no aggressive independent effort to shape policy or gather information about the threat of terrorism.

She did not wrestle directly with many of the other challenges the next president will face, including managing a large-scale deployment — or withdrawal — of troops abroad, an overhaul of the intelligence agencies or the effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology. Most of her exposure to the military has come since she left the White House through her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

When it came to the regional conflicts in the Balkans, she, along with many officials, was cautious at first about supporting American military intervention, though she later backed air strikes against the Serbs and the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.

Her role mostly involved what diplomats call “soft power” — converting cold war foes into friends, supporting nonprofit work and good-will endeavors, and pressing her agenda on women’s rights, human trafficking and the expanded use of microcredits, tiny loans to help individuals in poor countries start small businesses.

Asked to name three major foreign policy decisions where she played a decisive role as first lady, Mrs. Clinton responded in generalities more than specifics, describing her strategic roles on trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, India, Africa and Latin America.

Asked to cite a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. “There are a lot of them,” she said. “The whole unfortunate experience we’ve had with the Bush administration, where they haven’t done what we’ve needed to do to reach out to the rest of the world, reinforces my experience in the 1990s that public diplomacy, showing respect and understanding of people’s different perspectives — it’s more likely to at least create the conditions where we can exercise our values and pursue our interests.”

Crisis at Home and Terror Afar

There were times, though, when Mrs. Clinton did not appear deeply involved in some of Mr. Clinton’s hardest moments on national security. He faced a major one in 1998 — the bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and subsequently whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan. Just days after he acknowledged to his wife, the public and a grand jury that he had had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on targets suspected to be a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons factory in Sudan.

“It was the height of Monica, and they were barely talking to each other, if at all,” said one senior national security official who spoke with both Clintons during that time.

Asked if she talked to the president about the military choices or advised him, regardless of their personal problems, Mrs. Clinton was elliptical.